Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass, published in 2013, explored how humans intersect with and depend upon the rest of the living world. A member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, Kimmerer is a Western-trained botanist who teaches plant ecology and ethnobotany at the State University of New York’s College of Environmental Science and Forestry. Her award-winning book, which has sold more than 2 million copies, argued that environmental problem-solving must incorporate multiple streams of evidence from both Western and Indigenous science.
In November, Kimmerer published her third book, The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World, which positions the ethic of reciprocity, or gift economies, as a counterpoint to market economies, which she describes as rooted “in scarcity, competition, and the hoarding of resources.”
In an interview with author Mary Evelyn Tucker for Yale Environment 360, Kimmerer notes that both Western and Indigenous ecological knowledge need to be braided together for imagining and implementing environmental solutions. But Indigenous environmental knowledge, Kimmerer says, “is also associated with the understanding that we are learning from nature, not that we are learning about nature. Knowledge is always coupled to responsibility and to ethics.”
A serviceberry tree.
TasfotoNL via iStock
Yale Environment 360: Can you talk about how you came to write this new book?
Robin Wall Kimmerer: A few years ago, [Emergence Magazine] asked if I would write an article about economics. I accepted the challenge because as a botanist and an ecologist, I have some familiarity with the economy of nature, but only questions about human economy. Most of us, I think, are perhaps like me: We’re just embedded in this economy without really a sense of why it is the way it is. What are the assumptions? I feel deeply complicit and kind of entrapped in rapacious capitalism as it is practiced in the United States, but I had honestly never really interrogated it from the perspective of ecology.
So that’s what The Serviceberry attempts to do. It’s really more asking questions, saying I understand how the world of the serviceberry tree — in all of its relations with pollinators and dispersers and sun and soil and microbes — is engaged in a circular economy, where there’s no such thing as waste, where the notion of hoarding and accumulation and individual gain that are so pervasive in Western capitalist economics, they just make no sense in the economy of nature.
I wanted to have people think about why we have constructed an economy that actively harms what we love and damages our ability to sustain our lives and the lives of our more-than-human relatives.
“The language of natural resources suggests we own them, we deserve them, whereas I want to remember that it’s a gift.”
e360: You identify gratitude and reciprocity as the response to a gift economy. Can you share a little bit more of what this means?
Kimmerer: It’s so tied to our language — in the limitations and the constraints that the English language puts on us for thinking about the world. In the case of berries and soil and birds and water, in the academic world where I live, we call those things natural resources, meaning that they’re objects just waiting to be converted into something that we will value, as opposed to intrinsically being valuable for themselves. And the language of natural resources suggests that we own them, that we deserve them, whereas I want to remember that it’s a gift. We haven’t earned berries. We have not earned oxygen to breathe. We can’t buy it. It is not a commodity. It’s not a natural resource. To me, it’s a gift from the natural world.
And I wanted to imagine what a gift economy would look like. And here we go back to Indigenous science and to Indigenous knowledge because there are wonderful antecedents to our contemporary economic models in Indigenous economies. And for the most part, they are based on circular economies, they’re based on a kind of biomimicry from the natural world. They’re based on reciprocity. The currency of an economy is not money. The currency of those gift economies is gratitude. And there’s trust that when you have more than you need, you will share it with me because we have this currency of reciprocal relationship. That’s how the natural world works. Many traditional economies are based in that kind of thinking.
Red toadstools grow in a forest in Germany.
PHOTOGRAPHY IS ON via Shutterstock
e360: As you say in your book, we are kin to everything. So this is a huge shift in worldview. How are we going to make it?
Kimmerer: When we think about economic systems, there is this assumption underlying capitalism that participants in the market economy will work to advance their self-interest. This is just fundamental. Well, okay, we’ll accept that. But what are the boundaries of the self? If we define the self to be just an individual and their material needs in the world, that’s one kind of economy.
But what if we recognize that the self is very permeable? I am permeated by the plants that are feeding me. I’m permeable with the atmosphere, with the water. I am so not disconnected from the mycorrhizal network in the woods outside my house. We’re all part of this. So then I want to say, “Oh, okay, what would an economy look like if we advanced self-interest when the self is expanded to our natural kinfolk?” That interests me deeply. Now we’re talking about ecological economics, about how we not only foster our own wellbeing but the wellbeing of everyone in the system.
“There’s judgment and memory and learning in organisms that we have previously dismissed as really beneath our attention.”
e360: In the last 10 to 15 years, there has been a growing awareness coming from various sciences — including ecology, biology, botany, and animal behavior — of the multiple intelligences and communicating capacities of plants, trees, and forests, as well as birds, fish, and mammals. Indigenous peoples, of course, have understood this for a long time. Can you reflect on how this understanding of multiple intelligences is emerging now, and what are its implications for our relationship to nature?
Kimmerer: When we think about the world as not a warehouse of commodities but this wonderful community of persons all with their own kinds of intelligences — chickadee language, the constant communication that plants and fungi are undergoing, the senses of animals and the way that they inhabit and understand the world — [that is] so much deeper and richer and different than our own.
We used to simply dismiss this intelligence as the “other,” and in the Western tradition, “other” almost always is translated as inferior, lesser than. But this explosion of science and thought that you’re referring to is telling us something really different. There’s judgment and memory and learning in organisms that we have previously dismissed as really beneath our attention.
Rarely do I have the sense that I want to live forever, but I wouldn’t mind seeing where this revolution goes because it has such deep implications for how we live when we finally realize that we are not alone here, and that there are intelligences all around us that could really help us all.
The Whanganui River in New Zealand has been granted legal rights.
Rob Arnold / Alamy Stock Photo
e360: I want to just draw you out on the rights of nature. As you know, Taranaki Maunga, a mountain, the Whanganui River, and Te Urewera National Park have been given legal personhood in New Zealand. How do we connect this incredible way of knowing that is kin-based and relational and then saying, “There’s rights here”?
Kimmerer: The notion that a river, who the Maori consider to be their ancestor, should have rights of self-determination, that the river ought to decide whether it’s going to be dammed or whether it’s okay to spew toxins into it, oughtn’t the river to have a voice? So rights of nature is an acknowledgement and pathway to hearing the voices of self-determination by other beings who have an intrinsic right to live their lives. And I’m very excited about it. To me, the rights-of-nature movement is a political and legal flowering of this notion of kin-centric relations and the intelligence of nature.
I do have some questions, though, in that rights of nature is very much framed in Western legal frameworks. Whereas in my experience, what we’re really talking about is not so much rights but mutual responsibilities. So I have a little reluctance in centering Western legal thinking rather than sort of a reciprocal justice framing.
“The extent to which we can have human law be aligned with ecological law — so much the better.”
The body of law that interests me most is natural law, [which asks] what are those principles that govern our life support systems and govern our relationships from individual to the cosmos? And the extent to which we can have human law be aligned with ecological law — so much the better. But that requires a huge worldview shift, as you mentioned earlier, which is very, very slow in coming. So rights-of-nature frameworks, I think, can be a very effective stopgap while we’re on our way to a worldview change, as I think we must be. If we don’t [change], we as a species will not survive here. So it seems to me that we will be going down that path or no path at all.
e360: And promoting this shift in worldview is at the core of the work you’re engaged in now?
Kimmerer: Yes. The erasure of language, of culture, of ethics, of Indigenous science, of traditional ecological knowledge, all of that is part of my history, as is the powerful movement, which is afoot, of resilience and resurgence and revitalization to decolonize that history as best we can and participate in the healing and the recovery of identity, knowledge, land care, and language. All those things inform my work as a writer. And that story informs the founding of our Center for Native Peoples and the Environment, because this is all the healing work that needs to be done.
Moss grows in Silver Falls State Park in Oregon.
Rob Arnold / Alamy Stock Photo
e360: Many Indigenous peoples have this profound sense that we come from the stars. Cosmologists have also helped us to understand that the elements of life come out of the explosion of stars. Can you speak a little about the connection of the cosmos, Earth, and humans that is embraced by both Indigenous peoples and scientists?
Kimmerer: I can scarcely grasp the deep time of the cosmos, but a deep time that feels very relevant to me is the deep time of life on Earth. And within the plant kingdom, the beings that I have spent most of my career studying are the mosses, the most ancient. They were the first plants to come out on land. Every climate change that has ever happened on this planet, they have experienced. All the shifting of continents they have experienced, and they’re still here. Ninety-nine point nine percent of all beings, all species who ever evolved, are extinct. But as the world has changed, mosses have persisted. That’s deep time success.
And what I love to think about what they’re teaching us is “What does it mean to be successful?” Is it being the biggest, the most powerful, the most obvious? All those hallmarks that in the West we say, “Oh, that’s what it means to be successful.” Wait: These are plants that are a centimeter tall, but they live everywhere on the planet. There are hundreds of thousands of kinds of them. Their metric of success is persistence and beauty and longevity and making the world better wherever they are.
“Organisms who do not change when the environment changes are doomed.”
They are birthplaces of all kinds of ecological communities. They give more than they take. They collaborate more than they compete. For me, that is just one tiny, literally, example out of deep time. What do we have to learn from listening to ancient beings?
e360: And how does this incredible example of adaptation over time relate to us?
Kimmerer: Organisms who do not change when the environment changes are doomed, right? It’s resilience, it’s reading the constraints, and sifting among all of the fabulous diversity of solutions that are out there from this genetic storehouse of diversity. Which one of these things is going to be successful in a changed environment? We know from evolution that the raw material of evolution and adaptation is genetic diversity. So as we think about an evolving culture, a culture evolving towards sustainability, what’s the raw material there? Diversity. Cultural diversity is going to help us find our way. There’s so many different ways to be and shape our relationships that capitalism tends to try to make things all the same. It’s a great homogenizing force because of so-called efficiency. But resilience requires diversity, adaptation requires diversity, and we best not forget that.
